TAA
Temporal anti-aliasing
Also known as: Temporal Anti-Aliasing
Definition
TAA (Temporal Anti-Aliasing) jitters the camera each frame and blends the result with the previous frame using motion vectors, accumulating sub-pixel detail over time. It handles both edge and shader aliasing cheaply, which is why it is the default AA in modern AAA titles. The trade-off is ghosting on fast motion and slight blurring of static images — usually mitigated with sharpening passes.
In production
TAA jitters the camera sub-pixel each frame following a low-discrepancy sequence, then reprojects and blends the current frame with history from previous frames using per-pixel motion vectors pulled from the G-Buffer, accumulating detail no single frame could resolve alone. It handles both polygon-edge aliasing and shader aliasing cheaply in a single pass, which is why it's the default AA method in Unreal Engine 5 and most modern AAA titles running deferred renderers. The trade-off is ghosting on fast-moving or disoccluded geometry — a character's arm swinging quickly can leave a smeared trail — and a general softening of static, high-frequency detail like text, which studios typically counter with a sharpening post-process pass tuned to avoid re-introducing shimmer. UE5's TSR (Temporal Super Resolution) extends this same temporal-accumulation approach to also upscale resolution, effectively merging TAA and DLSS-style reconstruction into one pass.
